The tower of Pisa was designed to be a cathedral in 1173. But as nature would have, it is now an architectural failure for the world to stare at. The tower leans about four degrees southeast and continued tilting until 2012. One of the reasons the leaning tower of Pisa is titled is because of the soil it is built on. The tower was built on clay, fine sand and shells which makes the foundation of the building unstable. This tilted tower stands as proof that abiotic factors affect architecture.
Moving away from Europe and considering American architecture in the different regions of the country, we can identify that both abiotic and abiotic factors in the different regions also affect American architecture. This paper will try to explain how Native American architecture and religious beliefs were affected by the climate and the available vegetation and animals.
To be able to connect the architecture at the time to the climate, we have to understand the different climates in America. The country can be divided into nine climatic zones but only two would be considered here. This paper will be considering the humid continental and the semi-arid climatic zones. Semi- arid region is defined by low annual rainfall and short vegetation. So this climatic region is similar to a desert with the cold night and hot days with the difference that there is more rainfall and vegetation to better support life. The humid continental on the other hand has a variance in weather with warm or hot summers and considerably cold winters. These two regions have different climatic conditions which would affect how humans would adapt to survive.
The Native Americans were spread across the country and they had different cultures and religious beliefs dependin...
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...e heavens.
Nature has been defining the architecture of different regions since man started to build his own shelter. For example, homes in colder parts of the country would require more insulation as compared to homes in warmer parts like Florida. If we look at the building materials required for houses in tropical zones and temperate zones we would see that the houses in the tropical zones would rot if wood was a major building component while temperate zone require wood for their houses.
The art of making buildings is, like any other art form, dependent on its surroundings. Just as artists paint what they see around them, architects build what fits into the environment. Looking at the homes and temples of the two tribes, we see that their natural environment and the abiotic and biotic factors around them pushed them to produce the kind of architecture they did.
People have been living in America for countless years, even before Europeans had discovered and populated it. These people, named Native Americans or American Indians, have a unique and singular culture and lifestyle unlike any other. Native Americans were divided into several groups or tribes. Each one tribe developed an own language, housing, clothing, and other cultural aspects. As we take a look into their society’s customs we can learn additional information about the lives of these indigenous people of the United States.
Many things were influenced when the Native Americans and Europeans encountered one another for the first time. There views on humankind’s relationship to nature, the relationship of men and women to each other, and the relationship between different groups of human beings were influenced. They were influenced by the stories that the Native Americans passed down from generation to generation, the story that the Europeans believed from the Bible, and the views of Aristotle.
William H. Pierson, Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects: Technology and the Picturesque, (Doubleday & Company, Inc.), 167.
The European colonists and the Native Americans of North America had very different views on nearly everything they encountered in their lives. Living in vastly different cultures lead both groups to have two extremely different outlooks on four main topics; religious beliefs, the environment, social relations, and slavery, differences which the colonists used to their advantage when conquering the peoples of the New World.
The arrival of Europeans marked a major change on Native society and it’s spirituality. Native Americans have been fighting to keep their spiritual practices alive. Right from the beginning, Native American religious practices were misunderstood and forbidden. The United States government tried to force Christianity upon the Indians in a desperate attempt to destroy their traditions and to assimilate them into white Christian society. Many of the Native Americans were forcibly converted to Christianity.
Over the course of 408 years, from when the thirteen colonies were first founded and today, the traditions of European and Native American culture have always varied significantly. From their religious to their political views, the European and Native American beliefs have many common characteristics as well as many dissimilarities. These differences and similarities are most evident when comparing their creation stories and their constitutions.
American Indians and Native Americans refer to the descendants of indigenous people who populated the North American continent for centuries previous to the arrival of European settlers. These native groups were arranged into tribes and nations. Each tribe or nation preserved long-held cultural traditions that were swayed by provincial and environmental indicators that differ among them, and the cultural customs of these tribes cannot be typecast into one pattern. They learned to hunt, fish, battle the severe weather conditions, construct shelters or housing, and grew grains. The entrance of Europeans meant a shortfall in farming, hunting, trapping, and fishing grounds.
Architecture, the practice of building design and its resulting products, customary usage refers only to those designs and structures that are culturally significant. Today the architecture must satisfy its intended uses, must be technically sound, and must convey beautiful meaning. But the best buildings are often so well constructed that they outlast their original use. They then survive not only as beautiful objects, but as documents of history of cultures, achievements in architecture that testify to the nature of the society that produced them. These achievements are never wholly the work of individuals. Architecture is a social art, yet Frank Lloyd Wright single handily changed the history of architecture. How did Frank Lloyd Wright change architecture?
As someone with a passion for writing, my final project will be an extended expository essay about the history of homebuilding from ancient to modern times. It will discuss the different types of dwellings throughout recorded human history from the perspective of how art and culture influences building design. This will fulfill my own curiosity to understand the different influences on homebuilding and design over the years and how people have dealt with these changes.
"...the Egyptians made their complex heirachy of Gods, and their strange religion. In the service of that religion they made their architecture" (Romer: 75,1982).
In the process of development of human society, architecture and culture are inseparable. Cuthbert (1985) indicates that architecture, with its unique art form, expresses the level of human culture in different historical stages, as well as the yearning towards the future. According to his article, it can be said that architecture has become one of the physical means for human to change the world and to conquer the nature. Consequently, architecture has been an important component of human civilization. Since 1980s when China started the opening and reforming policy, a variety of architectural ideas, schools and styles have sprung up. Accompanying with a momentum of...
Frank Lloyd Wright has been called “one of the greatest American architect as well as an Art dealer that produced a numerous buildings, including houses, resorts, gardens, office buildings, churches, banks and museums. Wright was the first architect that pursues a philosophy of truly organic architecture that responds to the symphonies and harmonies in human habitats to their natural world. He was the apprentice of “father of Modernism” Louis Sullivan, and he was also one of the most influential architects on 20th century in America, Wright is idealist with the use of elemental theme and nature materials (stone, wood, and water), the use of sky and prairie, as well as the use of geometrical lines in his buildings planning. He also defined a building as ‘being appropriate to place’ if it is in harmony with its natural environment, with the landscape (Larkin and Brooks, 1993).
Human beings are susceptible to the force of nature. They had to make shelter for themselves. Material was one of the most basic tools to create shelter. By development of building construction, selection and use of materials also developed. The relationship between the architecture and the materials before invention of modern materials was simple and generally naturally [1]; in the past, architects always use tradition materials according their experimental skills. For choosing structural materials, they had attention to important factors such as availability (local materials) and harmony with climate and culture [2], although this way was forward with feedback. But this relationship was not continuing simply.
From the time of the ancient Greeks all the way to modern day, some part of humanity has almost always been interested in the past. For the ancient Greeks, it was discovering Mycenaean ruins and composing stories about them. Today, inspiration is still drawn from classical architecture. One has to look no further than the U.S. capitol building, or even the University of Michigan's Angell Hall to see remnants of this architectural style. This raises the question of why does it still persists? Logically, the best way to answer this is to examine the origins of classical architecture, and what it represented then and now. Furthermore, the study of ancient architecture can show insights into past civilizations which otherwise would have been lost.